What Happened to Our Time?

Or I could have said, where did our day go?

The older I get the shorter time seems to be. Now by the time I get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, do a few things on my list, it’s time for lunch. Same thing with the afternoon, it disappears and it’s time to make dinner. Evenings are much shorter too.

When I was kid a day lasted forever. Summers seemed like they went on forever. We had time to play, visit friends, ride our bicycles, zoom down the hill on skates lickety split and crash into the neighbor’s garage door to keep from killing ourselves. When we were teenagers, our group took turns hosting evening get-togethers at our homes and served homemade cookies and lemonade or Kool-Aid. We walked home in the dark. Not the least bit scary. I wrote and put on plays with the neighborhood kids. We had a girls’ club that met in the play house my dad built for me when I was younger, but was big enough for us to get-together and have secrets from the little kids.

And of course, I had plenty of time to read those ten books I got from the library each week. I was writing too. One summer I put out a magazine and charged five cents a copy.

We did chores too, but I have to admit, it was mostly doing dishes every night. I washed and my sister dried and we cleaned our rooms on Saturday.

We always went to Sunday School and Church on Sunday. Most Sunday’s we came home and had a big dinner. Afterwards we often visited with one of our relatives, my grandparents, or my aunts and uncles and all their kids.

We had wonderful birthday parties–usually two, one with our friends and then another with our cousins. With the cousins it was usually a picnic at one of the big parks.

Before TV we listened to the radio. I always listened to all the scary shows as well as Lux Radio Theater that had dramas with all the movie stars on them. Mom and I would go to the radio station to watch and then afterwards I’d get the stars autographs.

After my father built the first TV in our neighborhood, we had a lot of company in the evening who came to watch the magical box with us. Evenings lasted a long time too, I always had a project that I wanted to do.

Even after I had a family, once the children were all tucked into bed, I had my own private evening. Now, I’m the first one into bed.

Don’t get me wrong, I still cram as much as possible into every hour I’m awake, but those hours just don’t seem to last as long.

Maybe I’m just being nostalgic, but I don’t think so. I listen to what one of my married granddaughter does during her days, she’s a speech therapist at a public school and has two kids, a pre-schooler and a second grader. This summer, besides their vacation where they rode the rapids, yes, with their kids, camped, bicycled, rode an old fashioned train, the boy went to karate lessons and both kids took swimming lessons, the girl plays the violin and does that Irish dancing, and in the meantime, my granddaughter was taking a class for her profession. Her husband is a deputy sheriff and of course he helped with all this, but he also took a cake baking class and turns out he loves doing it and is now the official birthday cake baker for the family.

That’s the way my life used to be, jam packed with activity, now I can’t imagine even trying to do all that.

Now that I’ve written all that, I guess I’m just thankful that I can look back at all those great memories and be grateful that I still am able to do as much as I can.

Marilyn
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